The Next Accountability – Teachers and Schools

EdChoice has posted Part 2 of my new series on The Next Accountability. In Part 1 I outlined what we most want from a good education; now I outline the most important qualities teachers and schools should have to deliver these results:

All this can be summed up by saying that teachers need to be wise and professional. Wisdom means teachers possess themselves the capacities of head, hands and heart that we want students to develop. Professionalism means that teachers’ primary motivation is not to check boxes on a curricular chart or maximize formal outcomes such as test scores, or even to please parents, but to help students develop those capacities of head, hands and heart that the teachers possess and the students need.

The great challenge we face is that in our society, where we are free to disagree about what is good, true and beautiful, we lack consensus about what constitutes a good education. Good schools are therefore those that manage to overcome legal and bureaucratic obstacles to operate as free communities, with a shared commitment both to freedom of disagreement about the highest things and also to bonds of interdependence and reciprocity:

Freedom and community tend to lose their meaning when separated from one another. Real community means people freely choose to be in community. And real freedom can only be protected by a community that loves freedom and institutionalizes it as a shared, public moral commitment.

Next, in Part 3: how the two great camps in the debate over accountability – advocates of technocracy and choice – are, in different ways, trying unsuccessfully to sidestep the core problem of building consensus in a pluralistic society.